Correspondences show a certain grade of independence. Affinities can be innate or deliberately constructed, the similarities seem unpredictable and superficial, but the echoes of correspondences always sound familiar. We often associate the narration of Nature to the Impressionism. But the Impressionists were not the storytellers of Nature. They painted the Light, through the modern blink of the here and now, showing the shiny surface of the things. Expressionism has externalized the individual inner self, in front of the objects and the history, giving shape to the soul and the thoughts that lies beyond. It showed the dark side and, more often, the colorful one, the true nature of the subject, that reveals itself to our perception.

The Carnivore by Antonella Tomei, the heartbeating Dionaea, the star shaped Drosera, blossom like the Red Flowers painted by Emil Nolde, and the filaments and the thorns expand themselves, rippling as the green and blue waves of the German artist’s Summer Clouds. It is the same explosion, even if the green replaces the blue, and the matter is lush, expanded, its crimson becomes pink, like flesh speckled with dense white. The Nature is seething of life, it is the affirmation of the existence, pure and simple, that flows miraculously through the painting. In 1906 Nolde suddenly found inspiration in the living claim of each leaf, in each cluster of brilliant petals, dissolving all doubts and artistic dissatisfactions in the small masses of color, in the red pastes, the blue, the green and the white ones. These small paintings depict the life that shines in the gardens that they portray.

On those surfaces is trembling the same inevitable blooming that chains the eye to the Carnivore panels. A boiling that soaks of dark water the shapes of the Succulente, producing new buds, as it happens on Aquifer, or weaving mysterious cocoons and geometries, as in Cactofilia. The orientation of the artworks created by Antonella Tomei is often vertical in these series. It is a vertical but descending axes, opposed to the usual image of branches reaching up towards the sun. Utriculariaanfibia, another adamant Carnivora, ventures into the depths, like a fossil made fluid by the events. Saracenia unfolded her embroidery, a curved scar, an orange ornamental glyph in a forest of white solid dandelions and new greens, rare, darker, where the eye rests in depth. The fascinating forms of the Velenose unfold on the surface as plastic bat wings, and every tear of glaze is a stinger, which attracts and, at the same time, invites to be cautious.

Looking at this soil, rich and fertile, it seems that abstraction never shows, and if the thought reaches the work of Kandinsky certainly it is not on the basis of the accomplished theory of color and shapes, but rather on the musicality of the intuition. It is reasonable to think of artwork like Picture with three spots, n. 196 painted in 1914, with his purple heart, that starts the central movement involving the whole composition, squeezing it gently like organic tissue. The eye rests on the progress of the irregular circular auras that surround the cell, decorated with colored lines, thin like scratches, ready to multiply while it is lying, floating, wrapped in dilute shades. The same visual correspondences are present on the surface of the Campbell MoMA panels, especially the # 1 and the # 3, painted during the same year by the great Russian artist, and perhaps inspired by the four seasons. Their verticality, mixed with the mobile complexity of the genesis, goes along curiously with the turquoise horizontality of Water and Earth, represented by Antonella Tomei with a merging of graphisms and dilutions.

"... I learned how to draw living figure by classical canons. Gradually, my curiosity and my attention went to the color as the great scientific mark that distinguishes the individuals, because the color that characterizes everyone of us is written into the skin of each one ... I can’t compromise: shapes and colors have to attend to freedom of expression ... "

As it happened for the Campbell panels, the intentions were overcome by the gesture. It is not pure color, abstract from the existent. It is colors/matter in perpetual motion, linked to the natural cycles of life, of growth, of Nature.